1. Field of the Invention
The present invention disclosed herein relates to embedded software test, and more particularly but not by way of limitation, to a method for automatically generating a test case.
2. Description of Related Art
Typical embedded software is tested by monitoring and debugging an emulator. The monitoring may be synchronous or asynchronous. In synchronous monitoring, a source code debugger such as the remote Kernal GNU DeBugger KGDB is used to stop a program at a certain location in a source code and monitor a value of the corresponding location. In asynchronous monitoring, an independent monitoring daemon is used to monitor the entire embedded software, which may lead to inaccurate measurement of a source code that is to be monitored.
In both the synchronous monitoring scheme and the asynchronous monitoring technique, a code area, a data area, global variables, and a stack area may be monitored. Many such tests are performed on an ad-hoc basis rather than on an objective basis because determination of monitoring target symbols and analysis of the results may vary depending on the developers' experience/knowledge levels. Furthermore, simple monitoring techniques focus on test automation rather than identification of a test target (i.e., an input of a test case), generation of the test case, and analysis of the test results.
Embedded software is typically linked with hardware, a hardware abstraction layer (HAL), an OS kernel, device drivers, and upper-level application software. In an embedded system, the interfaces between such layers must be tested. This is, however, difficult to achieve using conventional test technology.